• olembe
  • #! CrunchBanger
  • Offline
  • From: Salisbury, England
  • Registered: 2009-04-29
  • Posts: 247

Topic: Laptop fan control in Stater/Debian

Hi all,

With Ubuntu derivatives, the fan in my Thinkpad X200s works just great. With Statler, I've found that it's mostly all fine - spinning up when under high load and spinning down afterwards, and so on. However, only when running on battery, and when under relatively light loads, the fan spins right down from time to time - on Ubuntu distros it never stopped completely. The problem is that when the fan spins back up, there's a short moment each time when the computer is unresponsive. It's only for a second or so, but it's a bit annoying when I'm trying to work.

I presume this is somehow related to laptop mode? Anybody know enough about it to advise how I can reproduce the more Ubuntu-like behaviour of never completely spinning down?

  • jpope
  • #! Junkie
  • Offline
  • From: USA
  • Registered: 2009-09-20
  • Posts: 275

Re: Laptop fan control in Stater/Debian

On my Eee, I install lm-sensors and fancontrol which can be configured to start/stop the fan at determined temperatures. You can configure the daemon by entering the following into a terminal: 

sudo pwmconfig

After you get it set up initially, if you want to edit the settings manually the config file is at: /etc/fancontrol
You will have to restart the fancontrol daemon for the new settings to be active with: 

sudo /etc/init.d/fancontrol restart
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  • olembe
  • #! CrunchBanger
  • Offline
  • From: Salisbury, England
  • Registered: 2009-04-29
  • Posts: 247

Re: Laptop fan control in Stater/Debian

Thanks, jpope. I just tried pwmconfig and it makes the good point that automatic fan control (which I currently have - cat /proc/acpi/ibm/fan returns 'auto') is preferable, and I guess that's true. The key question for me is why automatic fan control under Debian behaves differently to automatic control under Ubuntu. If I can learn that I should be able to crack this.

  • Registered: 2010-03-21
  • Posts: 27

Re: Laptop fan control in Stater/Debian

I guess Ubuntu's only strong point over Debian is support for hardware through its restricted drivers and this is it might be a case also... I have total recognition on my laptop from Ubuntu and still need to make the jump to debian..

  • From: London
  • Registered: 2009-07-19
  • Posts: 96

Re: Laptop fan control in Stater/Debian

Check out Thinkfan. It claims to be able to manage the Thinkpad's fan via the /proc/acpi/ibm.  I've not experienced the same on my T61, however I've heard this works well from this guy here

Good luck!

Registered Linux user #503837